Local veterans report that their disability payments have been hijacked

John McCarthy |
FLORIDA TODAY |
1:29 pm EDT April 30, 2018

75 Central Florida veterans were victims of VA bank fraud. How should you protect yourself?

Wochit

Bill Grooten was surprised to receive a letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs last month confirming the change he made to banking information where his monthly VA disability check would be deposited.

The reason he was surprised was that he had made no such change.

Grooten, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, immediately contacted the VA. But by then, his $3,500 monthly disability check had already been deposited in Bank of Internet USA, an online bank headquartered in San Diego.

The VA told Grooten that his bank might have been the site of the breach. But the Bank of America said it found no evidence of unauthorized activity with Grooten's account.

Chip Hanson, who is active in the local chapter of Disabled American Veterans, said that he has heard of as many as 75 veterans in Central Florida having had similar problems.

Grooten, who also receives a military pension, was able to work with the VA to get his money refunded into his own account. But he and and Hanson worry about disabled vets who rely on their VA compensation payments as their only source of income. For those folks, they say, any delay in payments can be a significant hardship.

"We’re concerned — and we don’t know the extent of this breach — about those people who live on this check" Hanson said.

The VA says its eBenefits system, which handles compensation payments for the nation's disabled veterans, has not been "hacked," but that individual accounts of veterans are sometimes "fraudulently accessed."

"Veterans are the targets of many of the same types of fraud as the rest of society, including mail, telephone and online fraud," wrote VA spokeswoman Jan Northstar in an email responding to FLORIDA TODAY's queries about the situation.

The local veterans were not the first to have their disability payments hijacked. News reports about such events date back to at least 2014. Northstar said 2,300 out of the 7.1 million eBenefits accounts had been compromised since 2015.

Cybersecurity concerns have dogged the department for years, most notably in 2006 when a laptop containing sensitive personal information about 26.5 million veterans was stolen from a VA employee's home.

An inspector general's report last June said the department had made progress, but still found significant problems with the department's cybersecurity efforts.

"VA also has not effectively implemented procedures to identify and remediate system security vulnerabilities on network devices, databases, and server platforms VA-wide," the report read.

The VA says that safeguarding "personally identifiable information" is a veteran’s best defense against being the victim of eBenefits and other fraud. Veterans should never disclose such information to an unknown third party and should regularly change their eBenefits and other account passwords.

Veterans who suspect they have been the victim of fraud should call VA at 1-800-827-1000 as quickly as possible. They can also contact VA’s Office of the Inspector General in any of the following ways: